Scavenging for More

Adam StyborskiTuesday, December 04, 2012

aking the most with the least available is an admirable goal. Thousands of stories, both fiction and non, revolve around the success of ingenuity borne from missing resources. It's a well-worn trope that is personified by the titular character of the 1980s television series MacGyver.

One of the reasons I use a prescreened pile of cards is that I generally overlook something when I have too much to look at, losing the trees within the forest. As several of you were quick to point out, my unhappiness with the shortage of creatures could have been adjusted by adding three:

Young Wolf's undying trigger resolves, returning it to play with a +1/+1 counter.

Use Ghave's first ability to remove the +1/+1 counter from Young Wolf, netting a Saproling creature token.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

Strangleroot Geist works the same way, and Lumberknot is a perfect fit for this in addition to being a hexproof place to put +1/+1 counters. I'm not MacGyver, but the mind-at-large of the community never fails to see what I don't.

Thanks for always being awesome.

This week's article is the second piece, maintaining the limitations outlined last week but beefing up our motley crew to include more rares. We can scavenge from where others aren't looking and build a deck that's both more exciting and closer to the power you may want for Commander.

Gold Standards

As I emphasized last week, there is no correct or incorrect choice for cards. What you want is always more important than any idea of need. With only four rares in our example deck it's easy to see that building a Commander deck without any rares (for those of you willing to reach into Legends and Chronicles for a commander) is possible.

Like many of you, I don't like cutting away rares from Commander. In fact, part of why I enjoy Commander so much is because I can pile together lots of splashy, sweet cards that I don't have a home for anywhere else. Balancing that desire against our restrictions is the tension at the heart of newer Commander players' barrier to entry.

Here are the restrictions we're working under:

How can we use more commons and uncommons to full effect?

How can we show newer players, using newer cards from newer sets, how to get in?

Put another way, they will limit what players can do, and how they can do it:

"Commons and uncommons" I took to mean without the splashy, powerful rares that are harder to find and acquire. I used the decklists and games featured in recent Grand Prix event coverage as a guide for what's hot and desirable as rares to avoid. I also looked at preconstructed decks and promotional cards from Prerelease events to see what may be more abundant.

"Newer players" I took to mean those who only have access to a small, recently released pool of cards—or, Standard legal.

Circumstances vary by player. Commons, uncommons, and rares that aren't featured in Standard tournaments are still daunting if you just picked up Magic with Return to Ravnica. It's impossible to cover everything, but the idea of looking through what you have to identify what you want to use is applicable everywhere.

I've already done that with rares in Standard, so it's just a matter to making swaps where one card does something I want in a way I like even better. It's not about defining one card as "better" than another, but that sometimes I like how a card gets the job done even more. Rares often fit the bill, but they don't have to.

The three cards pointed out before are a good example of this. None of these are rares, but the three new cards create +1/+1 counters in ways I want even more. I'll roll through modules like this before showing you one master summary for all the changes. Many of you love dataso I'm happy to oblige.

All of these swaps result from things I want to do better. I want to find what I'm looking for every time. I want to draw more cards during games. I want to fight flying and make more tokens. Above all, I want to fit more creatures into the deck, and these are creatures or help me get to them.

I could continue on, finding other rares I like more than another card already in the deck, but we're still bound by the first restriction of using "mostly commons and uncommons." These replacements up the rare count to twenty-one, including Ghave, Guru of Spores himself.

Tweaking the lands makes sense as we've increased our commitment to black and white, with cards like Vault of the Archangel, but the deck looks essentially the same.

You don't need every card to be the coolest rare you can find, but choosing which you want to include the most yields a dramatic difference. Nineteen of one hundred cards is a fair chunk to change, and it should show in how the deck feels when playing it.

Dashing Through Dining

The first game I played featured both a mono-blue Thada Adel, Acquisitor and blue-red Jhoira of the Ghitu deck. Both of these Commanders are among those I consider strong, and I knew both would bring powerful stuff to bear. The game unfolded in a strange way:

Just as Thada took complete control, the player had to quit. While all the artifacts that were stolen stayed out, the Jhoira player was primed to level the battlefield with Slagstorm. I had Ghave, Guru of Spores out and ripped Young Wolf off the top of the library.

One of The Mimeoplasm player had enough and cast Go for the Throat on Ghave. While it's hard to say why, as the player didn't share, I'd suspect it was due to how long it took me to iterate through the actions. Even with auto-yields it takes a lot of time to remove counters and sacrifice creatures.

Unfortunately, time really was against me: I was forced into concession by running out of time as Extractor Demon milling let one of the The Mimeoplasm players combo out the game.

Fungus Among Us

Did our deck of "mostly commons and uncommons" let us play some good Commander? I'd say we've succeeded. Our deck won't become a model for absolute power, or an oppressive feature our friends may hate. It's straightforward, aggressive, and gives us just a few ways to power out a battlefield full of critters and keep others honest.

It's also as weak as other decks to Supreme Verdict effects, as well as any deck that's brimming with the most powerful cards Commander can offer. Again, we can't ask a handful of rares to replace a well-tuned and battle-forged deck of power, but keeping things going and giving us ways to get in a few good licks is enough.

I'd love to hear what else you see for the deck.

Join us next week when we launch into one hell of a party. You're attending whether you like it or not. See you then!